Alongside the three ‘period’ rooms of the ancient music display at the London 1885 Inventions Exhibition stood a fourth: the ‘Oriental Room’. Less conspicuous than its historical neighbours, the ‘curious collection’ it housed included, according to the Monthly Musical Record, ‘a vast number of quaintly-shaped instruments of all kinds, stringed, wind, and pulsatile’. International exhibitions provided many different avenues for encounters between Western and non-Western cultures, and their musical displays were no exception. These encounters were, of course, highly curated, as the organisational practices that governed the exhibitions were deliberately constructed to perpetuate cultural and racial hierarchies. Narratives of Western ‘progress’ could be strengthened by contrasting objects of the Western musical tradition with ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ non-Western equivalents, in a space that took no account of these objects’ differing cultural and social uses and contexts. Yet, despite this one-sided mode of display, these exhibitions provided some of the first large-scale public forums for Western audiences to experience music from beyond Western Europe, not through ‘the imaginary world of European exoticism’ but head on, as the ‘real thing’.

The exhibitions of the 1880s provided two different forums for the display of non-Western musical instruments. At Sydney 1879, Melbourne 1880, Calcutta 1883, Adelaide 1887, and several of the London exhibitions, non-Western instruments were exhibited in the competitive, general sections, in the same space as newly manufactured Western instruments. Here, they were placed in direct competition with instruments by Western makers and were interpreted explicitly through a Western organological framework. Although some of these exhibits were contributed by British colonial agencies – as occurred at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition – in a few cases, objects were sent by members of the exhibiting cultures. However, even Abu Bakar the Maharajah of Johor (1833–95), Sourindro Mohun Tagore of Bengal, and the representatives of the Tokyo Institute of Music – three of the most prominent non-Western exhibitors – presented their displays in ways that emphasised a specific interpretive narrative, informed by their individual and complex relationships with the West.

In contrast to these ‘competitive’ exhibits, at London 1885 and Edinburgh 1890, many non-Western instruments were shown amongst museum-displays of ‘ancient’ or historical instruments, where they were presented as anthropological or ‘ethnographic’ objects. These instruments came from royal, university, and private collections, and were curated without the input of any member of the cultures that they supposedly represented.